A recent trend exists wherein information technology (“IT”) departments of companies and other entities design, configure and manage hardware and software assets to support business processes across the entire business cycle. Many companies have already enabled many of their IT systems to be available across departments, divisions and even to external business partners. To accomplish this, IT departments often implement an IT strategy that supports the connecting or sharing of resources and data in a flexible and standardized manner.
To accomplish the goal of flexible, standardized sharing of resources and data, some IT departments have adopted a service-oriented architecture (“SOA”). The SOA approach is relatively new and standards and new technologies to support SOA continue to emerge and evolve. One approach to implementing an SOA is the web services approach.
Typically, web services perform business functions that range from a simple data query to extensive transactions. Additionally, web services are often implemented to provide encapsulated access to core IT capabilities. Web services are implemented as self-contained, modular applications and are typically stored and invoked on a network. Developing a web services approach typically includes encapsulating business processes and core capabilities, modernizing existing assets through a standard interface, writing integration logic, and exposing the applications as services that are accessed over a network.
The integration logic component of a service often includes data translation and/or transformation capabilities. For instance, an external software application may access a service that provides access to a particular set of data such as the customer profile information for a given account number. However, the external application may not know the particulars of the database layout from which the information is to be acquired. To accommodate this functionality, services often include a “translate” (e.g., “transform”) capability that converts the request data into a format that the target database understands. Current methods typically provide data dictionary or copybook functions that contain the information to perform data translations. However, current solutions are often limited because the translation capabilities of a service are static (i.e. established at compile time). Therefore, a long-felt need exists for an IT service framework that enables dynamic data translation capabilities.